Upcoming Special Presentations on Meher Baba’s Life and Message
The Center is dedicated to being a vibrant source of information about Meher Baba’s life and message. The programs listed below reflect a variety of ways of presenting and sharing this information to all who are interested. For more information on the “Meher Baba’s Life and Message” program, please click here.
The Art of Praise as a Path to God: Francis Brabazon’s Foundation-laying for a New World Civilization
A Presentation by Ward Parks
October 17th: 10:00 to 11:30 a.m. and 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. at the Meeting Place
October 18th: 10:00 to 11:30 a.m. and 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. at the Meeting Place
October 19th: 10:00 to 11:30 a.m. and 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. at the Meeting Place
Praise and blame are two of the most potent tools in the arsenal of human expression. We praise what we love and want to become, and we castigate what we want to turn our faces away from. For this reason, praise helps to illuminate and motivate the search for God.
Among Meher Baba’s disciples, no one did more to articulate the role of praise in our relationship to the Divine Beloved than Francis Brabazon. Stay with God, his greatest single poetic masterpiece, explains how praise belongs to the essential nature of art itself, not just poetry, but painting, music, dance, and all those cultural forms that render before our eyes and ears and sensibilities what is highest and most beautiful. And through his own poetry—his songs, his ghazals, his narratives, his plays—Francis opened new channels and provided a model for how the art of praise can help inform the new civilization that will establish itself on the basis of Meher Baba’s Avataric Advent.
In this three-day program we will explore, through the medium of Francis’s poetry, the modalities of praise in all its range and diversity within the dynamics of the relationship between the lover and Beloved God.
Selected readings: from Stay with God, The Golden Book of Praise, Let Us the People Sing, In Dust I Sing, The East-West Gathering, The Word at World’s End, and other works.